Friday, 25 November 2011

Paper Sculptures - Gotta catch them all!

Yesterday afternoon staff at the Writer's Museum found something atop the donations box in the Robert Louis Stevenson room.

A wonderfully atmospheric street scene with what appears to be a silvery moon with wisps of cloud hanging from it. This tag reads:

"@CuratorEMG A Gift
"The stories are in the
stones" Ian Rankin
In support of Libraries, Books,
Words, Ideas ...... and
Writers."

And the 8/10 in the corner, confirming that we've found them all!

The cover says, "the stories are in the stones / Ian Rankin" ...

...which is fitting as it has been sculpted from a copy of Ian Rankin's Hide and Seek.

Inside the book are an array of people with birds on wires and a streetlight...

There are even goings-on visible behind some of the windows, as well as a pentagram scrawled on a wall in red with the signs of the zodiac around it.

Along the front of the scene have been placed the words, "commingled out of Good and evil;" Misha Hoekstra pointed out that this is a line from Jekyll & Hyde, "I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil," and that Ian Rankin has said of Hide & Seek that he was hoping to create an updated, Edinbugh-based version of Stevenson's story.

The curators are looking into ways to display this piece although it's possible that it will have to live in a different venue due to considerations of space - the Writer's Museum is absolutely packed with stuff! They're terribly happy with it though; apparently they had been hoping to receive one and now feel very lucky to have had one of the last three.

So this seems to be the end of the story. There is talk of organising some sort of exhibition but so far it's just an idea. Some of the 'gifts' are viewable anyway - those in the Scottish Poetry Library, the Scottish Storytelling Centre and Central Library (the gramophone in the National Library seems to have been temporarily displaced). The rest will hopefully find a place in the public eye and I'll keep an eye on them as I have grown rather attached.

Many thanks to whoever has been crafting and distributing these magical objects, and thanks on behalf of the creator to those who have followed their discovery with such infectious delight.